Gamification in Recruiting

Gamification is the concept which uses game theory, mechanics and game designs to digitally engage and motivate people to achieve their goals.

I had gone through a Gamification campaign being run by Dominoes, “create and name your pizza”. During this campaign customers were invited to create and name their digital pizza and were awarded with cash every time anyone purchases their bespoke pizza. Here the underlying factor is a customer is engaged and motivated as well with the brand itself via a game.

Companies generally use these gaming principles to intensify customer’s and employees’ interest in a brand and deepen their engagement. In today’s highly competitive environment each company includes atleast some Gamification technology on their portals. This may be profile rating, any engagement activity, Loyalty programs, wrapper game prizes, hidden tokens, simulated games, employee-of-the-month schemes or anything that needs interaction from the customer or employees.

Image source:Businessinsider.com

The graph above shows how the trend continues with Gamification and how the business of Gamification is growing.

Gamification helps in every field now a day from customer engagement to employee motivation, from recruiting to training and from employee productivity to evaluation.

Gamification in Recruitment

Professor Allen Huffcutt from Bradley University, expertise in job interviews, identified a number of problems with the current recruitment and the interview process. According to him the common questions being asked in job interview better help in self-evaluation. Candidates generally preplan their answers and still recruiters believe that they can judge a candidate against the job requirements.

This is where Gamification can help. When Gamification is coupled with recruitment it is often termed as recruitainment. Gamification can be integrated in recruitment process covering quizzes around industry challenges, company related quests, behavioural quizzes. . Gamification personalises and adds a fun element to the whole boring recruitment process. It encourages the candidate to engage with your company by providing simulated work environment and recruiters also check candidates’ aptitude, creative thinking and problem solving capabilities.

In-fact, Matt Jeffery, SAP vice president, global head of sourcing and employment brand, believes Gamification is extensively misjudged, “People rushed in and thought it is about adding a game to the recruitment process, which isn’t quite right”.

Why Gamification in Recruitment?

The most basic task of any recruiter is sourcing talent and engaging employees in the company. They need to ensure that they have champions across the organisation. For this they have to make sure that the candidates skills fit well with the company’s requirement and culture. When Gamification is applied to the recruitment process, it brings several benefits,

The process of candidate elimination is much faster as it allows companies to test specific skills like time management, creative and innovative thinking etc.

Helps the candidate to grasp the information about the company and policies while having fun.

Gamification’s tool, commonly known as “serious games”, has the potential to unearth the on-the-job performance of the candidate by providing him with a simulated platform of the job.it also helps in unveiling actual behavior and capabilities of the candidate.

Gamification is attractive and came as an innovative platform for the companies. It thus helps in establishing the brand as a leader in its field, especially among youth.

Seimens introduced Plantsville –that puts the player in the shoes of the plant manager at Seimen. Tom Warney, head of marketing and communications, sees it as a tool to incur interest among the youth for working with manufacturing industry. This was helpful for the company as well, because a player who has spent hours in virtually running a factory would perform better in real terms as he is already familiar with the whole process.

Image courtesy: www.candarine.com

Another successful game based on recruitment is My Marriot Hotel running on career page of Facebook where the visitors can experience virtually what it takes to manage process of Marriott hotel. Clicking on “Do it for real” directs you to the career page of Marriott.

Image courtesy: www.blogging4jobs.com

The goals of both the games are similar to those of the company’s requirements. Thus it simulates the work environment for the candidate making it easier for him/her to be more productive and also the company gets insight of the prospects that whether they will be able to survive the work pressure.

Planning Gamification

Introduction of any new technology or process involves risk. Hence, planning any game for recruitment process needs proper analysis and requires constant monitoring. Few points are to be considered before incorporating Gamification in recruitment process.

Consider your goals: Before we plan to include Gamification in any process of the company, it is important to have clear goals about why we need Gamification and what we want to measure as a result. The elements of Gamification are usually accountable for eg. Likes and share. But here the vital thing to understand is what our ultimate goal is i.e. if we want to create a buzz or it is for brand awareness or is it for encouraging talents to go through the career sites and explore opportunities.

Engaging:When Gamification is involved in recruitment, it should inspire the candidates to engage with the organization’s career sites and social media profile. The content should be simple, interactive and entertaining, but must always include the principles of Gamification. Surveys and page ratings are few examples that can be used to increase the interaction level of the site. Also the Gamification should be planned in a way that it had access to multiple candidates’ touchpoint across different geographical area.

Unveil the real candidate: Involving in Gamification generates data, in form of performance in the game and feedback. The game must be designed in a way that it enables the employer to understand more about the potential candidate, or the player. This would help the employer in the process of elimination and now the employer is more informed about the selected ones also.

Informative:the game should not only engage the player or the candidate, it must not only benefit the recruiter but also must provide the player with the insights of the organization.

Getting rid of “fashionable” image:Introducing Gamification to your career site adds a high level of innovation and uniqueness, but in its fashionable personation organizations find it difficult to maintain long term engagement. Richard Hamilton, marketing director of Guru Careers, said “While Gamification helped for initial attention, many companies find it hard to maintain long-term engagement after the initial enthusiasm wears away”. Thus companies need to make a serious game which stimulates long term engagement.

Different games for different approach:One must always remember, “No two games are alike”. Companies must approach recruiting and selection based serious games differently than they approach serious games for other management processes like learning, training and development.

Security issues:In games, there is lot of scope to game the game; hence a great need for security arises to create serious games for hiring purposes. While in training environment if the player cheats, he ultimately cheats himself as they are missing learning opportunities but when it comes to hiring, if a player cheats, the whole organization is cheated.

Gamification and the Future of Recruitment

Gamification converts the boring and frustrating task of recruitment into a fun element. Gamification helps employers and recruiters to create interest of qualified candidates in their job openings and companies.

Gamification boosts and builds your employer brand by differentiating your company from your competition. Information technology research firm Gartner predicted that over 70% of Forbes Global 2000 organisations will have at least one gamified application by 2014, with a belief that 25% of day-to-day business processes will be using aspects of Gamification.

Gamification creates a great experience for the candidate and the company itself that revives a lifeless recruitment process.